|
IRNewsLink Sponsored Executive Spotlight
The trek to a more effective e-mail marketing strategy
Yesmail’s Mike Hilts says marketers must deliver messages relevant to each customer and reach them via their mobile phones and Facebook pages.
When online retailers sit down to craft an e-mail and marketing communications strategy, it may help to consider StarTrek’s Captain Kirk and the origination of his request to be beamed up, says Mike Hilts president and general manager of e-mail marketing services firm Yesmail.
Yes, Captain Kirk.
“When Captain Kirk called Scotty and said ‘Beam me up’ it was Captain Kirk initiating the call, not Scotty,” Hilts says. “Scotty didn’t ask him every hour if he wanted to be beamed up.”
Today’s most effective e-mail campaigns, in a sense, work in a similar way, Hilts says, by filling a need or request initiated by a consumer rather than simply blasting out messages en masse, hoping a few lead to sales.
One way merchants can ensure the messages they send are ones consumers want to read is to simply ask customers what information they want. For example, an online retailer may offer a sign-up form on its home page where visitors can register for specific e-mail alerts. Consumers could choose to be notified, for example, when the retailer adds specific items such as a particular type of footwear or brand of kitchen appliance. E-mails of interest are sure to be read and more likely to convert, Hilts says.
Hilts is not alone in seeing this as a trend. A recent report from consultancy Forrester Research predicts marketers will begin using more triggered e-mails in the coming years. “They provide a service to consumers: pertinent information when they most need it,” states the report, entitled “US Email Marketing Volume Forecast, 2008 To 2013.”
“Traditionally e-mail has been a push medium, but e-mail and the web are interactive tools,” Hilts says. “What you are starting to see now is e-mail as more of a dialogue. Marketers are realizing that it is about communication and not about just sending out a blast.”
What’s more, that communication between marketer and consumer is expanding outside the traditional e-mail mold. Yesmail works with many leading online retailers and brand marketers like Hewlett-Packard, Macy’s, Kodak, Avon and Coca-Cola on integrating and optimizing e-mail with new and innovative channels like social media and mobile. “As an example we’ve worked with a handful of our existing clients on the distribution of sales widgets through their e-mail program, and how to best integrate SMS into their existing strategy,” Hilts noted.
“We’ve accomplished a key step within our mobile initiative over the past year, offering the capability to detect, format and send e-mails that render correctly on mobile devices,” Hilts says. “We’ve been focusing on presenting content that will look friendlier on a mobile device versus an eye-chart of text with links to web pages.”
The end goal is about effectively reaching consumers on their turf—on their handheld devices, via their mobile phones with text messages or on their social networks—while giving them something they want. Widgets for example, actively engage the users, whether they find it and sign up, or opt in to it. It offers consumers something fun and useful in the context of information they would be asking for or at a location they would visit anyway, Hilts said.
Down the road, Hilts envisions a variety of elements of messaging and branding working together. For example, a footwear retailer may send an e-mail announcing a new “Shoe of the Day” widget that promotes a discount on a particular shoe each day. Users could add the application to their Facebook pages and sign up for text message alerts that would tell them when a chosen footwear style or brand is featured.
“I’m really most excited about social media,” Hilts says. “It’s based on human behavior. It’s getting the customer involved in the process. But the best way for marketers to use these new systems is by integrating two or three different types of communication for a campaign across different channels.” Yesmail has even been working with Facebook on lead generation advertising for B2B marketers.
Research shows consumers are embracing social networks and text messaging. 35% of consumers received or sent at least one text message per week last year according to Forrester, up from 29% in 2007, and 16% visited a social networking site at least weekly in 2008, up from 13% a year earlier.
A new product module from Yesmail, called the Conversion Optimizer, helps marketers determine who to send e-mails to based on redundant purchase data. For example, a marketer can tell the Conversion Optimizer that it plans to send an e-mail with a discount on women’s gold pendants. Then, the marketer can set parameters, such as only send the e-mail to those it shows having a 75% chance or better of opening the e-mail and making a purchase.
Yesmail says one online retailer using the Conversion Optimizer generated 20% more revenue per e-mail campaign, targeted an additional 52% of subscribers that were likely to buy, and at the end of one month of campaigns, generated $100,000 of incremental revenue.
“The biggest request we get from a marketer is: ‘Tell me what happened yesterday, so I can take action today,’” Hilts says. “Our customers say, ‘I don’t want this uber-suite of data. I don’t want to dive into the analysis. I want a small, little portion of what is most important to me, delivered to me fast.’”
But, Hilts says, marketers should be aware of the differences between e-mail and these new forms of communications. For example, while tracking open rates, click-throughs and conversions is standard practice with e-mail marketing campaigns, comparable data may not be available for every social media application, depending on how the program works. In some cases the aim of the program may be exposure and brand awareness, which are harder to measure than e-mail conversion, although they may in fact drive sales, Hilts says. Other challenges are the cost of text, or SMS messaging, as marketers have to pay both to send the message and the fee a consumer would normally pay when opening a text from a friend.
Those challenges notwithstanding, marketers must evolve with their customers, as Star Trek’s voyagers adapted to their changing circumstances. Yesmail’s innovations in social media, mobile marketing and e-mail optimization are designed to help clients do just that.
|